Robert Owen Quotes

Genetics play a huge part in who we are. But we also have free will.

I think we are all individuals at the end of the day. There's nothing about culture that can prescribe who you're meant to be.

Every person is, in part, 'his own project' and makes himself.

Bring the child to the consciousness of his own dignity, and he will be free. We see no limit to what should be offered to the child, for his will be an immense field of chosen activity.

In one sense I feel that my book is a one-woman argument against determinism.

A few years ago, I found out that there's a lot of Gypsy blood on my mother's side. I'm wild in that way - I've been brought up to do my own thing.

I think there's great potential for autonomy, but we have to remember that we live in a world where people may have free will but have not invented their circumstances.

Having grown up in Bombay, from the day you're born, you have absolute freedom to choose who you want to be.

the identity of an individual is essentially a function of her choices, rather than the discovery of an immutable attribute

Circumstances make man, not man circumstances.

We have opted for petty determinisms - childhood trauma, genetic inheritance, social conditioning, etc. - that have made us comparatively passive. We seem to prefer to find excuses - which are really nothing more than the embrace of determinism, a sort of Stockholm syndrome relative to whatever we can claim as limitation. I am fascinated by the more enabling self-understanding. It has helped me to find my way out of the cloying comforts that are offered by prevalent psychological models.

Do we make ourselves into what we become or is it built into our genes, into the fate spun for us by whatever shapes events?

To me, freedom means having the power, the inherent right, the capacity and the ability to make choices that honour who I am.

An individual chooses and makes himself.

He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision.

Everyone should have the opportunity of not being over-influenced.

Man is the child of customs, not the child of his ancestors.

I fall down on the side of free will, simply because if you look at where I came from, and what I was able to do in my life, what was able to happen.

I guess destiny isn't the path chosen for us, but the path we chose for ourselves.

I came to the conclusion that there is an existential moment in your life when you must decide to speak for yourself; nobody else can speak for you.

You and only you are responsible for your life choices and decisions.

All my life I'd been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But with Constantine's thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.

Diminish the influence of fate

I'm a natural novelist. I'm interested in the person and the group, and how they mesh. And one of the ways I don't want them to mesh is for the person to be subsumed into the group.

Now and then women should do for themselves what men have already done—occasionally what men have not done—thereby establishing themselves as persons, and perhaps encouraging other women toward greater independence of thought and action.